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Divine Preparation

Let’s begin in the beginning, when I was preparing myself for this great adventure. There is always a preparation phase before great love comes. Sometimes it’s a gentle one, sometimes it’s a harsh one. Mine was downright ugly. Perhaps this is the way the universe works—it deals you an ugly hand before it deals you a beautiful one. The trick is trusting the beauty when it comes. It may never come again.

As much as I want to tell a love story that doesn’t include conflict, I can’t. War has framed my life from the beginning, influencing and permeating every step of the journey. I have lived war, I have loved war, and, even when I let it go, it has come back to reclaim me. We all have a way of being that we are here to outgrow. War is mine.

I was born on a battlefield in suburban Toronto. From the outside, it didn’t look like a place of battle, but suburban homes seldom do. In a well coiffured sub-division, it had two rocking chairs on the sweeping front porch, a small man-made waterfall, and a sweet lavender garden that covered most of the front lawn. You would think that the Buddha lived there, it was that peaceful.

Inside, there were three warriors. My histrionic Scottish mother screamed night and day, while my passive-aggressive Jewish father wavered between immobilizing depression and menacing attack. When their attacks on each other proved unsatisfying, they channeled their frustrations in my direction. They needed a punching bag more than they needed a son, and I unconsciously obliged. Although they named me Lowen, they actually called me “the mistake” behind muffled walls. I wasn’t the daughter they had longed for.

We spent the first 17 years of my life in battle. If we weren’t screaming at each other, we were screaming at our neighbors and relatives. The quiet times—infrequent as they were—were mere respites from our habitual way of being. Once everyone got a chance to rest and refuel, the arguments began anew, stocked with more ammo. Both as a necessary defense, and as a perfect reflection of my male conditioning, I turned to armor as a way of being. With ‘never surrender’ as my mantra, I navigated the battlefield with panache.

At the same time, I was a complete mess inside. There are few things more confusing than going to war with parents who are diminishing you, particularly when you are very young. If you fight for your dignity, you risk losing the love you need from them to develop. If you don’t fight back, you lose your self-respect and your development is stifled. How very confusing—to have to fight for your right to be here against the very people who brought you into existence.

The Abandonment Dance

When I finally escaped the clutches of my war-torn childhood, my forays into intimate relationship weren’t much better. I had imagined I would find some refuge in the arms of the feminine, but instead found that old habits die harsh. Each of my first intimate relationships seemed to magnify yet another unresolved issue, most of which I would have rather kept buried.

Soon after fleeing the war zone, I met my first girlfriend. A tenderhearted social worker, naomi would come by with peppermint foot massage cream and pumpkin pie ingredients, hands at the ready. She wanted nothing more than to love me. She didn’t stand a chance. Whenever she reached for me, I ran away. When she backed off, I ran after her. Ne’er the twain shall meet.

At the heart of our dance was an abandonment wound of radical proportions. Emotionally rejected by my mother, I was certain of only one thing in this world: my inherent unworthiness. If naomi loved me, she lost all credibility. If she exhibited signs of disinterest, she rose to immediate prominence in my inner world. If only I could get her to want me again, if only I could win her love, I could heal the wound. A perfect plan—until I won her over again, and immediately lost interest. Fractured by a distancing mother, I couldn’t bear to be left, even if I did the leaving. Crazy-making!

For many years, this wound shaped my relationships in its own image. Naomi was merely the first reflection. After she wisely gave up, I commenced a lengthy relational cycle that reflected both polarities of the wound in perfect measure. About half the time, I was the distancer, pulling away from kind women who simply wanted to love me. After only a short time in their arms, I became bored with their availability and lost my sexual charge.

The rest of the time I was the fuser, chasing unavailable wildcats as they sprinted off in the other direction. Their detachment actually ignited my sexuality, unconsciously turned on by the illusion that I was gaining the favor of my inaccessible mother. If I could bed the wildcat, I must be a worthwhile human. Of course, the ass was always greener on the other side. The moment they surrendered to my charms, I began looking over the fence for the next conquest. One way or the other, I was designed to avoid intimacy at all costs.

It took me many years to realize that everyone involved in the abandonment dance was living out their own baggage, even the kind and connective women who seemed so perfectly available for love. Although they appeared to have a greater capacity for intimacy than I did, the fact that they danced with my unavailability suggested otherwise. They wanted me for the same reasons I wanted the wild ones—as a reflection and perpetuation of their unresolved issues. It’s no accident that we were on the same dance floor together. We were all looking for dance partners in an empty ballroom.

Love-Proof Vest

No matter where I was on the abandonment continuum, there was a common thread—invulnerability. It came in countless forms: constricted musculature, evasive communication, detached sexuality, repressed emotions. Those who chased me knew it well. The moment they thought they had me, they immediately confronted the armor that encased my tender heart. My love-proof vest was impenetrable in form, crafted as it was with frozen feelings and congealed rage. Love relationship demanded surrender, but willfulness, conflict and armor were all I knew.

Despite my gamesy ways, I was able to do one thing with conviction—study. In each of my first three years of university, I made the dean’s honors list. In my second year, I won a bursary for writing an award-winning essay on emotional healing. God knows I wasn’t ready to actually do any healing, but I was ready to write about it. Funny how that works. Funny how we come at things conceptually first, before life pushes us to experience them in real time.

Just before my final year, I applied for law school. Although my LST and grades were strong, I was certain that I would be rejected. I wasn’t. I got into all six schools that I applied to. I decided to go to Osgoode Hall Law School in north Toronto the following autumn. I felt a deep desire to fight for the rights of the disenfranchised. If I couldn’t find fairness in my family, perhaps I could find it for others in the courtroom.

Ignited by the stresses of study, my anger began to infiltrate my love connections. Violence was not an issue, but emotional abuse became a common occurrence. With no sense of how to express my anger in a healthy way, I took it out on my girlfriends. Not surprisingly, I specialized in women with terrible self-concepts. I shamed them, as I had been shamed. Nasty business.

One of the primary ways that I avoided vulnerability was drama. Intensity was habitual and easily mistaken for aliveness. If I wasn’t having powerhouse sex with a woman, I was having a pointless argument with her. I loved the thrill of the chase. I loved make-up sex. I didn’t understand the difference between connection-avoidant intensity and intensity that is sourced in love’s light. My heart was aflame, but it wasn’t open. I was too busy starting fires.

Rear-view Mirror

And then the universe sent me my karmuppance in the middle of second term law school. Melanie was a trauma survivor with nipples of gold. From the moment I saw them, I was lost to a primal suckfest that lasted for months. So intoxicated by her projected mama breasts, I failed to notice that she was a pathological liar and a thief.

Her specialty was my specialty—intimacy avoidance. But she was much better at it than me. She would seduce me with her sensuality, then slip out the exit door just before morning, leaving her edible scent all over my bed sheets. The faster she ran, the harder I chased. Then, when I was sure she was truly gone, she re-appeared with her nipples on her sleeve, beckoning me home to Mama. What three-year-old cares where Mama had gone, now that she is back? Just give me the nipple, now! I was ensnared at my own game.

How easy it is to mistake the primal for the passionate.

Melanie was the perfect nexus of all my issues: abandonment, betrayal, drama, objectification. But she went one lie too far. I took her for an abortion in downtown Toronto. I paid the fee. She asked me to wait in the car. Twenty minutes later, she came out with her eyes moist and tender. She looked me straight in the eye and said, “I’m so sorry Lowen—twins.” My knees buckled. I had paid to abort my twin children. We drove back to the apartment, and I beat myself up all afternoon.

That night I had a dream. My long dead Uncle Bernie came to me and said, “She has the money in her wallet.”

Money in her wallet? I don’t understand.

But, of course, I did. For weeks, I wouldn’t touch her. I couldn’t admit what I knew out loud, but my body knew everything. The body never lies. We may misinterpret its message, but it always speaks the truth. My body knew why she asked me to wait outside. It knew that she staged the abortion to get the money. No doubt she told them she had chickened out, and they returned the money to her. No doubt she had said “twins” to me as some kind of over-compensatory smokescreen. I was caught in the grips of madness.

The next week, the tsunami rose to a crescendo. We were driving down the highway after an all-night battle. I was at war with my knowing. She was at war with my knowing. We began to argue, and I confronted her about the abortion. She was startled. How could I accuse her of such a thing? Then she tried to jump out of the car. Better to die than admit the truth. I grabbed her just in time.

I pulled over and got out of the car. I walked to the roadside and fell to the ground with a heavy thud. This is love? What the fuck do I know about love? I began to weep—the first time I had cried in years. Then I drove right home and contacted a therapist. The great gift of Melanie. I needed things to escalate into insanity before I could even begin to look in the rear-view mirror.

Exit: Healing Road

That summer, I requested a one-year sabbatical from law school and began my healing journey. I knew I had no choice—my stuff was catching up with me. I couldn’t focus on my studies with so many relationship dramas dominating my days. On a conscious level, I wanted to heal so I could be a more effective trial lawyer. On an unconscious level, I wanted to heal so I could finally taste love.

I got a part-time job at a downtown bookstore, and devoted the rest of my time to my healing process. With my therapist’s support, I slowly became acquainted with my emotional life. I went deep into the process, recognizing how the battleground that had been my home had forged an entirely warped lens on reality. A master of self-evasion, what I identified as reality was a fragmented patchwork of defenses and disguises. They were no longer serving me, but they were all I knew.

At some point, a wave of repressed emotion broke through my armor, demanding expression and release. As I plumbed the depths of my despair, I shed one layer of pain after another. My inner world was like a series of reservoirs, each holding a different wave of emotional memory behind them. When one reservoir burst, another soon appeared. This phase went on for many months—the first of many essential release phases.

At the heart of the inner work was an attempt to form a well-constructed self, essential to sustaining healthy connection: Solid me, solid we. Growing up in that war-zone had left me with a completely bifurcated self-concept, either boastfully egoic or dreadfully self-loathing. What I needed was to learn how to live in the middle—neither King nor trash, but healthily human. Without a balanced sense of self to land in, my forays into relationships couldn’t possibly sustain themselves. The key was to construct a healthy foundation to relate from.

By year’s end, a little light shone through the fissures in my heart. The light was fragmented, like I was fragmented, but there was enough of it to invite my optimism. I began to feel a measure of joy creeping into my inner landscape, a sliver of “yes.”

The next two years of law school included a cornucopia of intimacy adventures. Connections came in many forms: practical, playful, sensual, intellectually charged but emotionally barren, wildly dangerous. They lasted one evening, one weekend, or many months. I relished the opportunity to know myself in different ways, depending on the tenor of each dynamic.

Although many of the women I connected with called me “commitment-phobic,” the characterization didn’t resonate. I didn’t feel afraid. I just felt ill-prepared. I intuitively knew that I had so much to learn about connection before I could really hold one together. I needed an array of experiences first.

My therapist didn’t agree. He felt that I was playing a cat-and-mouse game with my intimacy: “You want to commit, but you still associate commitment with your childhood prison. Are you afraid you will never escape if you commit?”

One afternoon, he labeled me with something he called “The Unavailable Available Pattern.” It’s where you convince yourself (and others) that you are available for relationship, but you always find a way to stop short. That stopping short can manifest in many ways: choosing unavailable people, looking for excuses to run, focusing on a lover’s imperfections rather than their appealing qualities, getting lost in the excitement of ecstatic possibility until the first glimpse of real vulnerability sends you packing. It’s the addiction to possibility and the fear of intimacy all rolled into one.

I left him and found a new therapist, one with a more soulful lens. Yes, I had a bevy of issues, but not every choice I made was rooted in the neurotic psyche. Sometimes there is something much deeper going on. Sometimes there is a knowing that cannot be explained in psychological terms. I had the oddest sense that I was heading somewhere, rather than avoiding something. That I was preparing the soil for something plentiful. Who can criticize that faith?

Conscious Dating

After graduating and opening my own criminal law practice, I became more deliberate in my relational choices. I thought of it as conscious dating. Instead of walking through every open door, I stood back a little, contemplating the steps I was about to take. Whenever I was set to explore deeper, I brought it into my therapy, working through the emotional material at the heart of the decision.

I soon began to manifest relationships with a greater capacity for emotional intimacy. Reflecting this shift, I experienced a burgeoning interest in romantic love. Although still cautious, I crept out now and then with flowers and chocolates in hand. And sometimes, while having sex, I even felt the heart and genitals meet for a moment, before they scurried back to their separate corners. Up to this point in my life, my genitals were primarily pleasure-seeking missiles, looking to land somewhere soft before quickly returning to their hiding place. The idea that a physical union between two souls could open the God-gate was still well beyond my imaginings, but there was progress.

And now and then, I would actually get a vision of a woman waiting for me up ahead. I didn’t see her face, but I sensed her presence, as though she was encoded in the cells of my being. Sometimes I would hear her in my dreams, like a heart-song that rises through the ether with your name on it. Wishful thinking, or prescient visions? Time would tell.

At the same time, I still carried a deep cynicism where love was concerned. It threatened my organizing system, the hyper-vigilant way of being that had served me well. It was one thing to be vulnerable when alone, something else entirely to trust another to hold my heart safe. It felt safer to drop in for a visit now and then, before returning to my man-cave for a good night’s sleep.

Of course, this resistance wasn’t simply a reflection of childhood wounding. It was also a function of cultural conditioning. I had been taught to equate manhood with invulnerability—one eye on the door, one eye on my weapons. How to surrender to love with a pistol in my hand?

On the Hunt for God

After years of therapy, I began looking for God (whoever God was). I wanted something more than healing the mother wound. I wanted the Divine Father himself. Healing was a wonderful thing, but then what? What was on the other side of those mountains of emotional debris? What was the outer edge of human possibility? Where lived pure consciousness? How to drink from the God-root?

I looked for God everywhere. I hunted for him on the yoga mat, the meditation cushion, the Camino Pilgrimage. I looked for him in the heart of a disciplined meditation practice, energetic clearings, mantra and tantra. I looked and looked, but something was missing.

What was missing was connection. Not surprisingly, I was seeking God in the same way that male warriors had since the beginning of time: in my aloneness, in my isolated mind, on a meditation cushion separate from humanity. It was just me, and me alone, seeking the maker while the womenfolk were tending to the relational world. Even when I was sharing tantric delights, I had no template for mutuality. She was on her adventure and I was on mine. God was not somewhere we go together. He was at the end of a long, heroic solo journey through enemy territory.

But was it God I met alone in the wilderness, or just his pale imitation?

I soon came to question detachment as a path to enlightenment. In its healthiest forms, I got that it was a wonderful place to visit, a reminder of something beyond our localized perceptions, a peek into a vaster reality, an opportunity to distinguish between that which serves us and that which derails us. But taken too far, it felt more like self-avoidance masquerading as enlightenment. If this wasn’t so, then why did I fall right back into triggers shortly after getting out of my meditation cave and re-engaging with the world? And why did I feel more bereft of feeling as my practice deepened? Was this meditation or medication? The new Earth or the new Mars?

Frustrated in my quest, I began to look for meaning in another direction. Although my tendency to isolate was still prominent, a deeper longing for relationship began taking up space inside me, pushing up against my armor from the inside out.

I soon began to crave love. Out of the blue. I suddenly felt frustrated by its absence, as though it had been a treasure stolen from me while I was asleep. Was it?

Although talk therapy had been helpful to this point in the journey, I sensed I needed something deeper if I wanted to manifest real love. Dialoguing with a therapist played into my heady and strategic nature. At some point, it became another courtroom where I was trying to outsmart the opponent. I had to go deeper.

I began to explore more body-centered approaches to emotional healing in the hopes of excavating deeper layers of unresolved material. The exploration began with a massage therapist who adeptly worked through layers of holding in my musculature for two hours per week. Although I was by no means muscle-bound, I was heavily armored, like an impenetrable fortress. As she peeled the armor, older and older memories emerged, muscles with a story that needed to be told.

To accelerate the de-armoring process, I began doing session work with a body-centered psychotherapist. After four years of regular release sessions, I felt a deep letting go inside my heart. It’s like I had gone back down the path of my life and reclaimed a lost piece, one that held a key to my awakening. I felt lighter, softer and more genuinely available to the moment. Never mind detaching from the wound-body—immersing in it was the key to my salvation.

One afternoon, I went into the woods with my heart open and bared and actually asked for love. I walked miles from civilization, in the midst of a wild rainstorm, carried forward by a determination that defied reason. I arrived at a rambling brook, one I had never seen before but that felt entirely familiar. (Are locations encoded in our destiny, too?) It was getting dark and the branches were clanging in the wind. There was an ominous energy, an oddly inexplicable combination of destruction and passion.

I got down on my knees beside the brook and said aloud: “My spirit is tired of stumbling this earth alone. Please bring me love. Please...” The warrior within chastised my vulnerability. The lover being birthed beneath my armor celebrated.

I had actually asked the universe for love before, but never with this depth of conviction. To this point, the universe wouldn’t take my calls. It seemed my soulular phone plan wasn’t activated yet. Or perhaps I hadn’t paid my karmic fees yet. Whatever it was, it knew I wasn’t ready for the great crack open, the grand teaching. My heart was still too protected, my relational patterns too unstable. I needed more inner prep work to clear the lines. So they sent me substitute teachers, preliminary lessons on the path to readiness. No sense planting the cosmic seeds in an ill-prepared field. Better to prepare the soul-soil for a real good harvest.

The Call of the Beloved

As my inner work deepened, serendipitous events occurred to support my opening. Suddenly, I was bumping into people I had parted from at moments of tension, relationships that still weighed heavily on my heart and needed resolution. And they weren’t encountering me at random moments. They were walking into me just after I had thought of them, in the oddest of places. Even the carpenter who showed up to install hardwood in my apartment was from my unhealed past. I had bumped into his sister the week before. My intuition told me that I was no arbitrary tourist in these encounters. The universe was busy with me.

Soon, everything within and around me felt like it was shifting. There was a kind of crispness in the air, a poignancy, like the way it feels before a storm, or before a breakthrough experience comes your way.

Around this time, I began to dream about a petite blond woman, sensations of deep abiding love. I couldn’t see her face, but I could sense her presence beside me, walking together down sacred pathways. A karmic knot was loosening around my heart. I began to feel more and more certain that great love was coming into my life soon. How to articulate this knowing in human speak?

Before I knew it, the call to tenderness permeated my armored working life. It first happened in the middle of a rigorous cross-examination. I was going for the jugular when I was suddenly overcome with compassion. Never before had I felt remotely kind in a courtroom. Never before had I lost my focus in the heart of a trial. It was as though a presence had filled the room—a soft, open invitation to humanize this warrior charade. The presence wasn’t other worldly. It moved from the inside out, like an encoded path that had always been there, waiting patiently for its moment of revealing. Lay down your weapons, it said. Open your heart…

I walked home that day, disillusioned with the life I had created. Suddenly, trial law seemed like little more than a perpetuation of my childhood battleground. How had I not noticed? Why had I thought it would be different? I was now 36 years old with a growing practice—two secretaries and an eight-month-long trial list—and it all felt like the same old war. I wanted a deeper life, I did. I wanted something sweet.

I began to feel a throbbing sense of restlessness. I had extracted so much from my healing processes, but now what? I was healthy and successful, yet I was still walking this planet alone. I felt comfortable in my own skin, yet I longed for the feel of another’s skin upon mine. I longed to meet the woman of my dreams. She kept coming to me in my sleep, but where was she in my waking life?

One night, after yet another dissonant day in court, I knew I had to get away. A retreat of some sort. Something to give me a clue as to what’s next. I asked the universe for a sign, and two soon appeared. That night, I dreamed I was hiking the mountains around Boulder, Colorado. I had been there once before, at a holistic lawyer’s conference, and always wanted to return. The next morning, a young woman knocked at my door, soliciting donations for her local yoga studio’s seva mission. I had no idea what a seva mission was, but her peaceful energy inspired me to go on-line and search for a yoga workshop to attend.

The first to come up was a five-day yoga conference in Boulder. I clicked on it and knew I had to be there. As I hit “submit” to register for the retreat, I felt an electric current pulse throughout my body. It was crystal clear. Something was waiting for me in Colorado.

I wanted to share my excitement with someone. I immediately picked up the phone and called my best friend. “Daniel, I have news for you. I’m leaving for Colorado tomorrow.”

“Huh?... Why?”

“I’m going to meet the great love of my life.”

“Oh, yah. Sure.”

“No, I am. I really am,” I said confidently.

“Fly safe, loverboy,” he said, chuckling like a mad monkey.

I guess it was a secret for me alone to treasure.